How to install and manage software on CentOS 7

In this tutorial we are going to show you how to install and manage software on a Linux VPS running CentOS 7 as an operating system.

Installing and managing software on a Linux server running CentOS as an operating system is fairly easy. You can accomplish this by using a package manager called yum. First of all, connect to your CentOS VPS via SSH and check whether some of the installed packages on your system have available updates. You can do this by using the following command:

# yum check-update

The output of the command will show you the packages that have available updates and you should update them as soon as possible. You can update the packages one by one, and you can update all the packages at once using the command:

# yum update

The package manager will determine which packages need to be updated along with their dependencies and will calculate the total download size. You will be prompted to confirm the update of the packages which you can do by entering ‘y’ in the command prompt and then pressing Enter.

The yum package manager allows you to search for a package and retrieve more information about it before installing it on your system. The package manager will check the enabled repositories on your system and will search for the package in their databases. To check which repositories are enabled on your system you can run the command:

# yum repolist

To list all repositories including those which are disabled you can use the following command:

# yum repolist all

Now, to search for a package you can use the ‘yum search’ command. In our examples we will use the package named httpd. The package httpd provides the Apache HTTP Server. For example, to list all the packages that match the string httpd, you can run the following command:

To install a package, you can use the ‘yum install’ command. For example, to install the httpd package on your CentOS VPS, you can use the command below:

# yum install httpd

To list all the installed packages on your system along with their version and their repository you can use the command:

# yum list installed

Finally, to remove a package from your system you can use the ‘yum remove’ command. For example, to remove the httpd package from your system you can run the command:

# yum remove httpd

The package manager will also remove the packages which depend on it.

Of course you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our Linux VPS hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to install or remove a certain package for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

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